Hi all,

Just starting my first P2 project. After watching the seemingly detailed tutorial here...

http://www.avid.com/p2/

...I was very pleasantly surprised to find how easy and fast it was to get going. Imagine my surprise however when I came back into MC for my second session and found all my lovely new P2 media offline. Brilliant. A quick root around the help revealed this gem...

"If you leave the application and then restart it, you see the clips in the bin, but the media is offline. You need to import the clips again to continue working with them."

What a great feature! Of course I should've suspected something like this, knowing of course how Avid likes to import everything into it's own folders. I then discovered this thread and the 'actual' workflow

http://community.avid.com/forums/p/45595/256436.aspx#256436

It's more clearly laid out here

http://community.avid.com/forums/p/56132/313268.aspx#313268

My point is this: why are these very clear and necessary steps not either in the help or in the official tutorial? What is the point of a tutorial of it does not include the required steps? And why can the import clips to bin/ import media commands not be combined to avoid this nonsense?

I do see how for a job with a couple of cards and a quick turnaround you could just use step 1, but anothing more than a couple of bins to re-import each time seems silly. 

Sorry for the vent chaps but it I just find this particularly bizarre. I thought i was ready for my job tomorrow but now each card has to consolidated to the media drives, tedious.

Hopefully I am wrong about this but it also seems that the imported P2 media has no link to its source, either before or after consolidation. No UNC path is recorded. If you lost your media drives and need to batch import you'd have to manually input the source for each clip.

The P2 media is linked to the source because it is the source prior to consolidation or transcoding.  You see these issues because Avid only creates temporary database pointers to the media, since the P2 cards are themselves are regarded as only temporarily available.

Once you consolidate or transcode the media, the new master clips refer to the consildated/transcoded media only.  With Avid, it was ever thus.  I have two workarounds that I use to protect against catastrophic loss (apart from using RAID 5 for my media drives).  The first is to directly copy the P2 media into \Avid MediaFiles\MXF\1, where the media tool can directly find it.  The problem with that approach is that the media is all orphaned, ie., not associated with any project.

The second is to use the consolidate/transcode approach and then use the copy function in MDV to backup the new media for storage.  Then the P2 cards are recycled.  This has the advantage of tying the media to your project, while giving you backups that you can use.

Long term neither is a good solution for Avid.  They need to rethink the import process so that they have a method of maintaining more permanent links to transient media.

Or you could transfer with 'P2 Viewer' software from Panasonic your P2 card footage to a virtual drive [cheap-o usb or firewire external drive] .  Then bring that footage into the Avid as mentioned in previous steps. 

If you Avid system drive crashes, you still have that virtual P2 drive so that you could rebuild your project [even if you blew it off your P2 card]

fiendish:

My point is this: why are these very clear and necessary steps not either in the help or in the official tutorial? What is the point of a tutorial of it does not include the required steps? And why can the import clips to bin/ import media commands not be combined to avoid this nonsense?

...Because Avid does not seem to understand these manuals need to be written in a task oriented format !

i.e. If you want to perform "x," then you select "y" in menu "f."

Instead you get manuals full of feature lists, without one shread of information about how or more important, "where" the menu setting is located. I am very critical of the manuals. The genious of MC is clearly there. The challenges lie in learning how to get the potential out of the software.

 ... one of the classic "you need to know how to use the software to understand the manual" type of manuals.

Indeed, the most useless kind for anyone who isn't an old hand. In it's current form, the Avid manuals are nothing more than a not very good reference for people who know what they're doing, and a last resort at that. This has to change surely, it has gone on long enough. If they really want to deal some blows to Apple and their toys then they need to address these kind of issues. And a tutorial that has incorrect information is less useful than no tutorial at all!

As regards P2, the problem seems to lie in the fact that the software regards the import location as temporary which it would be in the case of actual cards. But in the case of virtual cards it seems entirely sensible these would be kept in the same place on a system or network storage, at least for the duration of the project. Surely MC could easily record the UNC path as it does with normal imports.

Jwrl - in the end I got my media in by doing P2 clips to bin, then moving the mxfs from the virtual cards into \Avid MediaFiles\MXF\1 etc. When I went back into MC the media was then associated with the project.

Never tried that.  Good to know!

Could you guys educate me a bit here? There are two "Design Issues" on which Avid is working and I'm not sure which you have here.

When you are importing, are you first using "Import P2 Clips" and Then using "Import P2 Media"?

If so, is the problem you are having re-importing the clips? If not, what exactly happens to your media after you have imported it (Not the clips, but the actual media)?

Hi Blkdog. The first problem I had was after using "Import P2 Clips". Almost instantly the media was accesible inside MC and ready to cut with. Then when loading MC for my second session I found all my media offline. This was because I hadn't performed step 2, "Import P2 Media". It wasn't clear in either the official tutorial or the manual that both steps were necessary. Indeed, why couldn't one command do both things?

Secondly, I noticed that once I'd performed step 2, and the P2 media was consolidated into the Avid Media Files folder, the clips were not linked to the original P2 source. This source media was in several virtual P2 cards on one of my raid volumes. This suggest that if my media drives went down, batch import would be a very laborious manual process.

Great, I'm with you now. As to the first part, I've been through the tutorial and the docs an it says, really clearly, that you need to do both steps. How could that be made clearer for you? Give me an idea of what would work better for you if you would.

The reason it is two steps is to facilitate workflows that don't need to import the media right away like on location pre-viz cuts and things like that. It's really handy to be able to cut from P2 instantly in a lot of cases so, in that regard, I like the two steps. I was thinking that it would be nice if there were a third option added to do both but then would that needlessly confuse things? I go back and forth.

As for the second problem, this is one of the design issues to which I was referring. There are a lot of meetings in Tewksbury about this problem and we're all hoping it gets redesigned very quickly.

BLKDOG:

There are a lot of meetings in Tewksbury about this problem and we're all hoping it gets redesigned very quickly.

Shades of the shoddy, cheap but well marketed VHS beating out the superior Betamax and Philips V2000 systems all over again.

Ok Andrew, we get it you don't like P2. 

Unfortunately it's a format that needs to be addressed and this is one problem Avid needs to sort out.

Blikdog - I'm specifically talking about the official tutorial here http://www.avid.com/p2/ and the manual. I got the proper steps from this user tutorial http://community.avid.com/forums/post/313268.aspx.

I accept the info was available here, just seems weird it's not in the official guides. I also accept that sometimes you may just want to cut P2 immediately in one session but I imagine the majority of people won't be doing this.

fiendish:

I had was after using "Import P2 Clips". Almost instantly the media was accesible inside MC and ready to cut with. Then when loading MC for my second session I found all my media offline.

Have Avid add a prompt at the close session time to remind you to import the P2 media before you quit a P2 session.  Solved.